Records management and other content management applications and systems have been provided to automate the process of managing objects and/or records in accordance with applicable legal, business, or other requirements, for example Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirements or Department of Defense requirements. Control over a “policy” and governing of one or more of the creation, organization, storage, access, naming, marking, retention, security, and disposition of an object are among the aspects of records management that typical records management and content management applications and systems provide.
The application of a policy involves an administrator to craft and/or describe the policy. Typically more than one policy is crafted for different objects, for example they may have different aging rules. Administering all these different policies creates complexity for the administrator, introduces error, for example through the misapplication of a policy to an object, and increases resource overhead.